Doctor from NZ, independent researcher (grand futures / macrostrategy) collaborating with FHI / Anders Sandberg. Previously: Global Health & Development research @ Rethink Priorities.
Feel free to reach out if you think there’s anything I can do to help you or your work, or if you have any Qs about Rethink Priorities! If you’re a medical student / junior doctor reconsidering your clinical future, or if you’re quite new to EA / feel uncertain about how you fit in the EA space, have an especially low bar for reaching out.
Outside of EA, I do a bit of end of life care research and climate change advocacy, and outside of work I enjoy some casual basketball, board games and good indie films. (Very) washed up classical violinist and Oly-lifter.
All comments in personal capacity unless otherwise stated.
bruce
We’re asked to believe that HR, legal, the CEO, the COO, and multiple managers all independently failed a basic moral test. More likely, in full context, it read like a messy workplace complaint with too much personal detail.
And we haven’t seen it. Everything we know comes from fragments read aloud from memory by a colleague, relayed months later in a post written as advocacy. We don’t have the information this thread thinks it has.
I would be much more sympathetic to this if it wasn’t for the case that two independent investigations subsequently flagged this as harassment/sexual harassment, including CEA’s own legal team, and the apparently massive shift in behaviour after Frances opted for public accountability.
If Riley was complaining about behavioral issues connected to Frances’s trauma, and she herself acknowledges worsening PTSD and difficulty functioning, then providing that context in a complaint isn’t sexualization. It’s explanation. Clumsy, probably too detailed, but meaningfully different from the post’s framing.
It’s entirely reasonable for someone to submit an HR complaint, and it’s entirely reasonable for you guess that Riley was well intentioned and clumsy rather than malevolent. But it’s not clear to me what your interpretation of the post’s framing is. From my perspective, Frances hasn’t made any claims about Riley’s intent, but just the impact that the circulation of this document.
Nine months went by and I heard absolutely nothing. No safeguarding steps were taken. The document remained in circulation.
For a while, I tried to block the harassment out entirely. I was completely overwhelmed and simply did not have the capacity to process it. I was already managing a PTSD diagnosis as a result of the rape and an ongoing criminal investigation with the UK police. I no longer trusted CEA’s HR. Not to mention, I didn’t have access to the document myself.
As the months went on, I became increasingly anxious and embarrassed around leadership and those who had read the document. Increasingly dissociated. I began having nightmares about new documents being circulated. My therapist noted my PTSD symptoms were continuing to worsen. When I ran into Riley at the office, I would often freeze. I started eating lunch in my team’s room to avoid the cafeteria, or skipping lunch altogether.
To be clear, I don’t think that the focus on Riley’s intention meaningfully changes the mistakes at CEA here! I’d type more on this, but here’s a good passage on that point.
I received this in my DMs and am sharing anonymously on their behalf:
Zach says: “Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate …”, but this seems to be obscuring the fact that she wouldn’t even have had a chance to self-advocate if it hadn’t been for some member of staff (presumably against CEA policy) sharing the existence of the doc with her. I wonder why this wasn’t addressed in the reflections.
Indeed, why is it that when someone did have concerns the thing they did was to partially disclose things to Frances rather than raise it within CEA? This does seem to suggest that people reading the document could feel worried about it, and also might be suggestive of issues with internal culture. I feel a bit worried that this isn’t a part of what CEA appear to be taking responsibility for addressing.
Can you check your claude link? this is what it links to for me:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XxXnPoGQ2eKsQx3FE/data%20concerning%20a%20natural%20person%E2%80%99s%20sex%20life
Hey Zach, thanks for the response.
I know you are unlikely to be able to reply to this with anything meaningfully helpful, and this might be frustrating for you, but I just wanted to flag some things that from the outside seem at minimum incongruous.
I’ve typed this quickly and without visibility into all of the considerations and information you have, so apologies in advance if this is more uncharitable than you’d like. (emphasis in quotes added)
Those concerns were the focus of Riley’s writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didn’t share) it. We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously, and avoid retaliatory action against the person raising the concerns. These obligations exist in part to avoid creating a chilling effect where employees feel uncomfortable raising HR concerns for fear of negative consequences for themselves.
Sorry but presumably:
CEA’s obligation as an employer to evaluate complaints seriously also applies to Frances?
CEA’s obligations around confidentiality would also apply to the sharing of Frances’ experiences in the doc?
an employee raising concerns about something doesn’t shield them from all misconduct or harassment during the process of raising the concern?
What about the chilling effect of staff not feeling comfortable raising HR concerns, or even working in your organisation because empirically CEA don’t seem to take harassment / sexual harassment sufficiently seriously? Does the idea that multiple managers, HR, CEO, and COO of an organisation can allow a sexualised description of an employee’s rape (etc) to be spread in the organisation without their consent, disregard an offer from the community health team to step in, and take ~no actions for 9 months not seem like it might have some kind of a chilling effect (or more)? I recognise that it’s important for HR concerns to be evaluated seriously but it feels like this standard wasn’t applied in any meaningful way to Frances?
It is now clear the ways in which our approach was too limited, too focused on following a standard HR process, and insufficiently proactive in recognizing the harmful nature of the contents included with the complaints.
I hope you appreciate that it’s difficult to take this statement seriously; it really doesn’t seem like the issue here is that CEA was following a standard HR process, both during the 9 months, as well as after the complaint.
What standard HR processes include “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” as appropriate responses? Alternatively, it seems like CEA’s ‘standard HR process’ does not capture the fact that the kind of content circulated might very obviously be considered a separate HR issue? (I recognise you explicitly name some of these failings afterwards and I don’t want to discount that, I just separately don’t really think it’s very convincing that HR was ‘too focussed on following a standard process’ is a good excuse / representation of what happened, and wanted to call that out.[1]
CEA should have proactively initiated this investigation sooner, without requiring Frances to act first. Failing to do so placed an unfair burden on Frances to self-advocate during what was an already difficult time...
Fair enough! Sorry if I’m reading too much into what might just be ~boilerplate. But acknowledging just the start time of the investigation makes it sound like you agree that this investigation should have been done, and once Frances advocated for this you took this seriously[2] (perhaps bar some ‘communication issues’ that you acknowlege).
But if:
CEA’s own legal team decided this was harassment
you later acknowledge[3] that creating a culture that prevents/addresses sexual harassment included staffing changes such as removing Riley, etc;
Then why did CEA propose things like “designated walking paths” and “assigned meal times” the first time round, instead of just taking action at that stage? This doesn’t seem like it’s just an issue of “CEA wasn’t proactive about initiating this investigation”, but also one where it didn’t take the investigation or HR processes for Frances appropriately seriously! Also, this does not appear to just an issue of Riley, or of HR here. This document allegedly crossed multiple managers, as well as your, and the COO’s desk! Should readers be concluding that somehow none of the people involved considered taking further action? Or that they did take more actions and it didn’t go anywhere? Or something else?
To be more explicit, right now it doesn’t seem like there’s any public information I can draw on to rule out something like “CEA took actions that appear consistent with them being motivated more by protecting themselves from legal and reputational risk, rather than because they are primarily interested in the wellbeing of their employees”.[4]
Given the seriousness of the situation I hope you understand me holding you to the public standard rather than base this off any positive personal interactions I may have had with you and any other CEA staff!
I also recognize laying groundwork means we are far from the desired end state, and that we will need to work hard to improve instead of offering quick fix solutions.
Part of the issue here is that even the groundwork that has already been laid did not help in this case right? What’s the reason the EA community, or prospective employees, should trust that things are different this time around?
(written in personal capacity)- ^
Perhaps I’d be more convinced by something like “existing processes were grossly inadequate +/- not applied consistently”, for example
- ^
“We have an obligation as an employer to treat such complaints confidentially, evaluate them seriously...”
- ^
“In particular, we need to create a culture where there is more organizational ownership and proactivity to prevent and address sexual harassment. We’re laying the groundwork for some of those changes via new staffing (Riley no longer works at CEA, we have a new HR manager, and multiple additional hires are on the way).”
- ^
See also the extent to which the effort CEA put into it changed once Frances informed the board that she was considering going public
To be clear that claude conversation was not a conversation from a CEA staff member! I was just very surprised about what seems to have happened here. I had a conversation with claude to show that even if you knew nothing about HR or workplace practices, you’d get to a better set of recommendations than what happened in practice if you just asked an LLM.
Thanks for sharing this Frances, really harrowing to read. Echoing Liv/Max’s comments above. 💜
After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients.
This seems wild? Can someone at CEA comment on why at no point anyone thought to say something like “this is an extremely inappropriate message to write about your co-worker”, and notify Frances? What was HR / leadership doing over these 9 months? It also seems like action only seemed to be prompted by Frances going to the board that she was going to share her experience?
Even if someone had a conversation with claude 6 months in, while having 0 empathy, understanding of HR, or legal obligations, it seems like you’d have done better than what happened in practice. Is there an alternative explanation to this being (at least) gross incompetence on the HR +/- leadership front at CEA?
======Other things in the post I wanted to highlight:
Some people seemed to believe that my trauma was a mitigating factor in this harassment. That because I was already traumatised by the rape, my reaction was “inflated,” and therefore Riley was somehow less culpable.
And finally: If you ever find yourself defending an action by reminding the victim that it isn’t as bad as a violent felony, it might be time to take a long and reflective walk.
Really wild to read this coming from people working at an org in the centre of a movement intending to think thoughtfully about the most important and stakes-y problems in the world.
EA organisations love to foster an attitude of “we’re all on the same team.” But informal processes are more likely to fail victims and enable perpetrators. “Same team” does not work in the face of power imbalances. I would strongly encourage women not to defer to their organisations in these cases. Seek external support, trust what you have experienced, and if applicable, know the law.
I strongly agree with this even in general. EA often strongly selects for ‘value alignment’ and ‘mission alignment’. This isn’t an excuse for the organisations and their leaders not to do the bare minimum in terms of basic competence, legal obligations, and just being an empathetic human, but it is surprising (and disappointing) that these things like this seem to happen, and I definitely know other scenarios where assuming this high-trust culture would include trusting you would have made things worse for the people involved.
If you cannot discuss your feelings in the workplace without sexually harassing another person, it’s time to sit down and learn the difference between honest, meaningful, relevant communication and the nonconsensual sexualisation of a colleague.
If you decide, by default, that everyone in your group is self-aware, well-intentioned, and telling the truth, and you then make their intent a central factor in assessing misconduct, you will almost never find abuse. You’ve made it structurally impossible.
(written in personal capacity)
I don’t bite the bullet in the most natural reading of this, where very small changes in i_s do only result in very small changes in subjective suffering from a subjective qualitative POV. Insofar as that is conceptually and empirically correct, I (tentatively) think it’s a counterexample that more or less disproves my metaphysical claim (if true/legit).
Going along with ‘subjective suffering’, which I think is subject to the risks you mention here, to make the claim that the compensation schedule is asymptotic (which is pretty important to your topline claim RE: offsetability) I think you can’t only be uncertain about Ben’s claim or “not bite the bullet”, you have to make a positive case for your claim. For example:
I will add that one reason I think this might be a correct “way out” is that it would just be very strange to me if “IHE preference is to refuse 70 year torture and happiness trade mentioned in post” logically entails (maybe with some extremely basic additional assumptions like transitivity) “IHE gives up divine bliss for a very small subjective amount of suffering mitigation”
Like, is it correct that absent some categorical lexical property that you can identify, “the way out” is very dependent on you being able to support the claim “near the threshold a small change in i_s --> large change in subjective experience”?
So I suspect your view is something like: “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinity at some point, earlier than 70 years of torture”?[1] If so, what’s the reason you think this is the correct view / am I missing something here?
RE: the shape of the asymptote and potential risks of conflating empirical uncertainties
I think this is an interesting graph, and you might feel like you can make some rough progress on this conceptually with your methodology. For example, how many years of bliss would the IHE need to be offered to be indifferent between the equivalent experience of:
1 person boiled alive for an hour at 100degC
Change the time variable to 30mins / 10min / 5min / 1 minute / 10 seconds / 1 seconds of the above experience[2]
Change the exposure variable to different % of the body (e.g. just hand / entire arm / abdomen / chest / back, etc)
(I would be separately interested in how the IHE would make tradeoffs if making a decision for others and the choice was about: 10/10000/1E6 people having ^all the above time/exposure variations, rather than experiencing it themselves, but this is further away from your preferred methodology so I’ll leave it for another time)
And then plotted the graph instrument with different combinations of the time/exposure/temperature variables. This could help you either elucidate the shape of your graph, or the location of uncertainties around your time granularity.
The reason I chose this > cluster headaches is partly because you can get more variables here, but if you wanted just a time comparison then cluster headaches might be easier.
But I actually think temperature is an interesting one to consider for multiple additional reasons. For example, it’s interesting as a real life example where you have perceived discontinuities of responses to continuous changes in some variable. You might be willing to tolerate 35 degree water for a very long time but as soon as it gets to 40+ how tolerable it is very rapidly decreases in a way that feels like a discontinuity.
But what’s happening here is that heat nociceptors activate at a specific temperature (say e.g. 40degC). So you basically just aren’t moving up the suffering instrument below that temperature ~at all, and so the variable you’d change is “how many nociceptors do you activate” or “how frequently do they fire” (all of which are modulated by temperature and amount of skin exposed), and that rapidly goes up as you reach / exceed 40degC.[3]And so if you naively plot “degrees” or “person-hours” at the bottom, you might think subjective suffering is going up exponentially compared to a linear increase in i_s, but you are not accounting for thresholds in i_s activation, or increased sensitisation or recruitment of nociceptors over time, which might make the relationship look much less asymptotic.[4]
And empirical uncertainties about exactly how these kinds of signals work and are processed I think is a potentially large limiting factor for being able to strongly support “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinite bliss at some point”[5]I obviously don’t think it’s possible to have all the empirical Qs worked out for the post, but I wanted to illustrate these empirical uncertainties because I think even if I felt it would be correct for the IHE to reject some weaker version of the torture-bliss trade package[6], it would still be unclear that this reflected an asymptotic relationship, rather than just e.g. a large asymmetry between sensitivity to i_s and i_h, or maximum amount of i_s and i_h possible. I think these possibilities could satisfy the (weaker) IHE thought experiment while potentially satisfying lexicality in practice, but not in theory. It might also explain why you feel much more confident about lexicality WRT happiness but not intra-suffering tradeoffs, and if you put the difference of things like 1E10 vs 1E50 vs 10^10^10 down to scope insensitivity I do think this explains a decent portion of your views.
- ^
And indeed 1 hour of cluster headache
- ^
I’m aware that approaching 1 second is getting towards your uncertainty for the time granularity problem, but I think if you do think 1 hour of cluster headache is NOS then these are the kinds of tradeoffs you’d want to be able to make (and back)
- ^
There are other heat receptors at higher temperatures but to a first approximation it’s probably fine to ignore
- ^
Because of uncertainty around how much i_s there actually is
- ^
Also worth flagging that RE: footnote 26, where you say:
Feasible happiness is bounded—there are only so many neurons that can fire, years beings can live, resources we can marshal. Call this maximum H_max.
You should also expect this to apply to the suffering instrument; there is also some upper bound for all of these variables
- ^
e.g. 1E10 years, rather than infinity, since I find that pretty implausible and hard to reason about
Note also that you can accept outweighability and still believe that extreme suffering is really bad. You could—e.g. - think that 1 second of a cluster headache can only be outweighed by trillions upon trillions of years of bliss. That would give you all the same practical implications without the theoretical trouble.
+1 to this, this echoes some earlier discussion we’ve had privately and I think it would be interesting to see it fleshed out more, if your current view is to reject outweighability in theory
More importantly I think this points to a potential drawback RE: “IHE thought experiment, I claim, is an especially epistemically productive way of exploring that territory, and indeed for doing moral philosophy more broadly”[1]For example, if your intuition is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is worse than 1E10 and 1E100 and 10^10^10 years of bliss, and these all feel like ~equally clear tradeoffs to you, there doesn’t seem (to me) to be a clear way of knowing whether you should believe your conclusion is that 70 years of the worst possible suffering is “not offsetable in theory” or “offsetable in theory but not in practice, + scope insensitivity”,[2] or some other option.
I’m much more confident about the (positive wellbeing + suffering) vs neither trade than intra-suffering trades. It sounds right that something like the tradeoff you describe follows from the most intuitive version of my model, but I’m not actually certain of this; like maybe there is a system that fits within the bounds of the thing I’m arguing for that chooses A instead of B (with no money pumps/very implausible conclusions following)
Ok interesting! I’d be interested in seeing this mapped out a bit more, because it does sound weird to have BOS be offsettable with positive wellbeing, positive wellbeing to be not offsettable with NOS, but BOS and NOS are offsetable with each other? Or maybe this isn’t your claim and I’m misunderstanding
2) Well the question again is “what would the IHE under experiential totalization do?” Insofar as the answer is “A”, I endorse that. I want to lean on this type of thinking much more strongly than hyper-systematic quasi-formal inferences about what indirectly follows from my thesis.
Right, but if IHE does prefer A over B in my case while also preferring the “neither” side of the [positive wellbeing + NOS] vs neither trade then there’s something pretty inconsistent right? Or a missing explanation for the perceived inconsistency that isn’t explained by a lexical threshold.
I think it’s possible that the answer is just B because BOS is just radically qualitatively different from NOS.
I think this is plausible but where does the radical qualitative difference come from? (see comments RE: formalising the threshold).
Maybe most importantly I (tentatively?) object to the term “barely” here because under the asymptotic model I suggest, the value of subtracting arbitrarily small amount of suffering instrument from the NOS state results in no change in moral value at all because (to quote myself again) “Working in the extended reals, this is left-continuous: ”
Sorry this is too much maths for my smooth brain but I think I’d be interested in understanding why I should accept the asymptotic model before trying to engage with the maths! (More on this below, under “On the asymptotic compensation schedule”)
So in order to get BOS, we need to remove something larger than , and now it’s a quasi-empirical question of how different that actually feels from the inside. Plausibly the answer is that “BOS” (scare quotes) doesn’t actually feel “barely” different—it feels extremely and categorically different
Can you think of one generalisable real world scenario here? Like “I think this is clearly non-offsetable and now I’ve removed X, I think it is clearly offsetable”
And I’ll add that insofar as the answer is (2) and NOT 3, I’m pretty inclined to update towards “I just haven’t developed an explicit formalization that handles both the happiness trade case and the intra-suffering trade case yet” more strongly than towards “the whole thing is wrong, suffering is offsetable by positive wellbeing”—after all, I don’t think it directly follows from “IHE chooses A” that “IHE would choose the 70 years of torture.” But I could be wrong about this! I 100% genuinely think I’m literally not smart enough to intuit super confidently whether or a formalization that chooses both A and no torture exists. I will think about this more!
Cool! Yeah I’d be excited to see the formalisation; I’m not making a claim that the whole thing is wrong, more making a claim that I’m not currently sufficiently convinced to hold the view that some suffering cannot be offsetable. I think while the intuitions and the hypotheticals are valuable, like you say later, there are a bunch of things about this that we aren’t well placed to simulate or think about well, and I suspect if you find yourself in a bunch of hypotheticals where you feel like your intuitions differ and you can’t find a way to resolve the inconsistencies then it is worth considering the possibility that you’re not adequately modelling what it is like to be the IHE in at least one of the hypotheticals
I more strongly want to push back on (2) and (3) in the sense that I think parallel experience, while probably conceptually fine in principle, really greatly degrades the epistemic virtue of the thought experiment because this literally isn’t something human brains were/are designed to do or simulate.
Yeah reasonable, but presumably this applies to answers for your main question[1] too?
Suppose the true value of exchange is at 10 years of happiness afterwards; this seems easier for our brains to simulate than if the true exchange rate is at 100,000 years of happiness, especially if you insist on parallel experiences. Perhaps it is just very difficult to be scope sensitive about exactly how much bliss 1E12 years of bliss is!
And likewise with (3), the self interest bit seems pretty epistemically important.
can you clarify what you mean here? Isn’t the IHE someone who is “maximally rational/makes no logical errors, have unlimited information processing capacity, complete information about experiences with perfect introspective access, and full understanding of what any hedonic state would actually feel like”?
On formalising where the lexical threshold is you say:
I agree it is imporant! Someone should figure out the right answer! Also in terms of practical implementation, probably better to model as a probability distribution than a single certain line.
This is reasonable, and I agree with probability distribution given uncertainty, but I guess it feels hard to engage with the metaphysical claim “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness” and their implications if you are so deeply uncertain about what counts as NOS. I guess my view is that conditional on physicalism then whatever combination of nociceptor / neuron firing and neurotransmitter release / you can think of, this is a measurable amount. some of these combinations will cross the threshold of NOS under your view, but you can decrease all of those in continuous ways that shouldn’t lead to a discontinuity in tradeoffs you’re willing to make. It does NOT mean that the relationship is linear, but it seems like there’s some reason to believe it’s continuous rather than discontinuous / has an asymptote here. And contra your later point:
“I literally don’t know what the threshold is. I agree it would be nice to formalize it! My uncertainty isn’t much evidence against the view as a whole”
I think if we don’t know where a reasonable threshold is it’s fine to remain uncertain about it, but I think that’s much weaker than accepting the metaphysical claim! It’s currently based just on the 70 years of worst-possible suffering VS ~infinite bliss hypothetical. Because your uncertainty about the threshold means I can conjure arbitrarily high numbers of hypotheticals that would count as evidence against your view in the same way your hypothetical is considered evidence for your view.
On the asymptotic compensation schedule
I disagree that it isn’t well-justified in principlle, but maybe I should have argued this more thoroughly. It just makes a ton of intuitive sense to me but possibly I am typical-minding.
As far as I can tell, you just claim that it creates an asymptote and label it the correct view right? But why should it grow without bound? Sorry if I’ve missed something!
And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the second thing—see point 3 a few bullets up. It seems radically less plausible to me that the true nature of ethics involves discontinuous i_s vs i_h compensation schedules.
I was unclear about the “doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse” part you’re referring to here, and I agree RE: discontinuity. What I’m trying to communicate is that if someone isn’t convinced by the perceived discontinuity of NOS being non-offsettable and BOS being offsettable, a large subset of them also won’t be very convinced by the response “the radical part is in the approach to infinity, (in your words: the compensation schedule growing without bound (i.e., asymptotically) means that some sub-threshold suffering would require 10^(10^10) happy lives to offset, or 1000^(1000^1000). (emphasis added)”.
Because they could just reject the idea that an extremely bad headache (but not a cluster headache), or a short cluster headache episode, or a cluster headache managed by some amount of painkiller, etc, requires 1000^(1000^1000) happy lives to offset.
I guess this is just another way of saying “it seems like you’re assuming people are buying into the asymptotic model but you haven’t justified this”.- ^
“Would you accept 70 years of the worst conceivable torture in exchange for any amount of happiness afterward?”
Thanks for writing this up publicly! I think it’s a very thought provoking piece and I’m glad you’ve written it. Engaging with it has definitely helped me consider some of my own views in this space more deeply. As you know this is basically just a compilation of comments I’ve left in previous drafts, and am deferring to your preference to have these discussions in public. Some caveats for other readers: I don’t have any formal philosophical background so this is largely first principles reasoning rather than anything philosophically grounded.[1]
All of this is focussed on (to me) the more interesting metaphysical claim that “some suffering in fact cannot be morally justified (“offset”) by any amount of happiness.”
TL;DR
The positive argument for the metaphysical claim and the title of this piece relies (IMO) too heavily on a single thought experiment, that I don’t think supports the topline claim as written.
The post illustrates an unintuitive finding about utilitarianism, but doesn’t seem to provide a substantive case for why utilitarianism that includes lexicality is the least unintuitive option compared to other unintuitive utilitarian conclusions. For example, my understanding of your view is that given a choice of the following options:
A) 70 years of non-offsettable suffering, followed by 1 trillion happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of non-offsettable suffering (NOS)], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at barely offsettable suffering (BOS), followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
You would prefer option B here. And it’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion, and I’m not sure you’ve made a compelling case for this, or that world B contains less relevant suffering.
Thought experiment variations:
People’s intuitions about the suffering/bliss trade might reasonably change based on factors like:Duration of suffering (70 minutes vs. 70 years vs. 70 billion years)
Whether experiences happen in series or parallel
Whether you can transfer the bliss to others
Threshold problem:
Formalizing where the lexical threshold sits is IMO pretty important, because there are reasonable pushbacks to both, but they feel like meaningfully different viewsHigh threshold (e.g.,”worst torture”) means the view is still susceptible to unintuitive package deals that endorse arbitrarily large amounts of barely-offsettable suffering (BOS) to avoid small amounts of suffering that does cross the threshold
Low threshold (e.g., “broken hip” or “shrimp suffering”) seems like it functionally becomes negative utilitarianism
Asymptotic compensation schedule:
The claim that compensation requirements grow asymptotically and approach infinity (rather than linearly, or some other way) isn’t well-justified, and doesn’t seem to meaningfully change the unintuitive nature of the tradeoffs your view is willing to endorse.
============
Longer
As far as I can tell, the main positive argument you have for is the thought experiment where you reject the offer of 70 years of worst conceivable suffering in exchange for any amount of happiness afterwards”. But I do think it would be rational for an IHE as defined to accept this trade
I agree that package deals that permit or endorse the creation of extreme suffering as part of a package deal is an unintuitive / uncomfortable view to want to accept. But AFAICT most if not all utilitarian views have some plausibly unintuitive thought experiment like this, and my current view is that you have still not made a substantive positive claim for non-offsettability / negative lexical utilitarianism beyond broadly “here is this unintuitive result about total utilitarianism”, and I think an additional claim of “why is this the least unintuitive result / the one that we should accept out of all unintuitive options” would be helpful for readers, otherwise I agree more with your section “not a proof” than your topline metaphysical claim (and indeed your title “Utilitarians Should Accept that Some Suffering Cannot be “Offset””).
The thought experiment:
I do actually think that the IHE should take this trade. But I think a lot of my pushbacks apply even if you are uncertain about whether the IHE should or not.
For example, I think whether the thought experiment stipulates 70 minutes years or 70 years or 70 billion years of the worst possible suffering meaningfully changes how the thought experiment feels, but if lexicality was true we should not take the trade regardless of the duration. I know you’ve weakened your position on this, but it does open up more uncertainties of the kinds of tradeoffs you should be willing to make since the time aspect is continuous, and if this alone is sufficient to turn something from offsettable to not-offsettable then it could imply some weird things, like it seems a little weird to prioritise averting 1 case of a 1 hour cluster headache over 1 million cases of 5 minute cluster headaches.[2]
As Liv pointed out in a previous version of the draft, there are also versions of the thought experiment which I think people’s intuitive answer may reasonably change, shouldn’t if you think lexicality is true:-is the suffering / bliss happening in parallel or in series
-is there the option of taking the suffering on behalf of others (e.g. some might be more willing to take the trade if after you take the suffering, the arbitrary amounts of bliss can be transferred to other people as well, and not just yourself)On the view more generally:
I’m not sure you explicitly make this claim so if this isn’t your view let me know! But I think your version of lexicality doesn’t just say “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should avert this no matter how much happiness we might lose / give up as a result”, but it also says “one instance of NOS is so bad that we should prioritise averting this over any amount of BOS”[3]
Why I think formalising the threshold is helpful in understanding the view you are arguing for:
If the threshold is very high, e.g. “worst torture imaginable”, then you are (like total utilitarianism) in a situation where you are also having uncomfortable/unintuitive package deals where you have to endorse high amounts of suffering. For example, you would prefer to avert 1 hour of the worst torture imaginable in exchange for never having any more happiness and positive value, but also actively produce arbitrarily high amounts of BOS.
My understanding of your view is that given a choice of living in series:
A) 70 years of NOS, followed by 1 trilion positive happy human lives and 1 trillion happy pig lives, or
B) [70 years minus 1 hour of NOS], followed by 1 trillion unhappy humans who are living at BOS, followed by 1 trillion pig lives that are living at the BOS,
you would prefer the latter. It’s not at all obvious to me that we should find this deal more acceptable or intuitive than what I understand is basically an extreme form of the Very Repugnant Conclusion. It’s also not clear to me that you have actually argued a world like world B would have to have “less relevant suffering” than world A (e.g. your footnote 24).If the threshold is lower, e.g. “broken hip”, or much lower, e.g. “suffering of shrimp that has not been electrically stunned”, then you while you might less unintuitive suffering package deals, but you end up functionally very similar to negative utilitarianism, where averting one broken leg outweighs, or saving 1 shrimp outweighs all other benefits.
Formalising the threshold:
Using your example of a specific, concrete case of extreme suffering: “a cluster headache [for one human] lasting for one hour”.
If this uncontroversially crosses the non-offsetable threshold for you, consider how you’d view the headache if you hypothetically decrease the amount of time, the number of nociceptors that are exposed to the stimuli, how often they fire, etc until you get to 0 on some or all variables. This feels pretty continuous! And if you think there should be a discontinuity that isn’t explained by this, then it’d be helpful to map out categorically what it entails. For example, if someone is boiled alive[4] this is extreme suffering, because suffering involving extreme heat, confronting your perceived impending doom, loss of autonomy or some combination of the above. But you might still probably need more than this because not all suffering involving extreme heat or suffering involving loss of autonomy is necessarily extreme, and it’s not obvious how this maps onto e.g. cluster headaches. Or you might bite the bullet on “confronting your impending doom”, but this might be a pretty different view with different implications etc.
On “Continuity and the Location of the Threshold”
The radical implications (insofar as you think any of this is radical) aren’t at the threshold but in the approach to it. The compensation schedule growing without bound (i.e., asymptotically) means that some sub-threshold suffering would require 10^(10^10) happy lives to offset, or 1000^(1000^1000). (emphasis added)
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This arbitrariness diminishes somewhat (though, again, not entirely) when viewed through the asymptotic structure. Once we accept that compensation requirements grow without bound as suffering intensifies, some threshold becomes inevitable. The asymptote must diverge somewhere; debates about exactly where are secondary to recognizing the underlying pattern.It’s not clear that we have to accept the compensation schedule as growing asymptotically? Like if your response to “the discontinuity of tradeoffs caused by the lexical threshold does not seem to be well justified” is “actually the radical part isn’t the threshold, it’s because of the asymptotic compensation schedule”, then it would be helpful to explain why you think the asymptotic compensation schedule is the best model, or preferable to e.g. a linear one.
For example, suppose a standard utilitarian values converting 10 factory farmed pig lives to 1 happy pig life to 1 human life similarly, and they also value 1E4 happy pig lives to 1E3 human lives.
Suppose you are deeply uncertain about whether a factory farmed pig experiences NOS because it’s very close to the threshold of what you think constitutes extreme / NOS suffering.If the answer is yes, then converting 1 factory farmed pig to a happy pig life should trade off against arbitrarily high numbers of human lives. But according to the asymptotic compensation schedule, if the answer is no, then you might need 10^(10^10) human lives to offset a happy pig life. But either way, it’s not obvious to the standard utilitarian why they should value 1 case of factory farmed pig experience this much!
Other comments:
In other words, let us consider a specific, concrete case of extreme suffering: say a cluster headache lasting for one hour.
Here, the lexical suffering-oriented utilitarian who claims that this crosses the threshold of in-principle compensability has much more in common with the standard utilitarian who thinks that in principle creating such an event would be morally justified by TREE(3) flourishing human life-years than the latter utilitarian has with the standard utilitarian who claims that the required compensation is merely a single flourishing human life-month.
I suspect this intended to be illustrative, but I would be surprised if there were many, if any standard utilitarians who would actually say that you need TREE(3)[5] flourishing human life years to offset a cluster headache lasting 1 hour, so this seems like a strawman?
Like it does seem like the more useful Q to ask is something more like:
Does the lexical suffering-oriented utilitarian who claims that this crosses the threshold of in-principle compensability have more in common with the standard utilitarian who thinks the event would be morally justified by 50 flourishing human life years (which is already a lot!), than that latter utilitarian has with another standard utilitarian who claims the required compensation is a single flourishing life month?
Like 1 month : TREE(3) vs. TREE(3) : infinity seems less likely to map to the standard utilitarian view than something like 1 month : 50 years vs. 50 years : infinity.
Thanks again for the post, and all the discussions!- ^
I’m also friends with Aaron and have already had these discussions with him and other mutual friends in other contexts and so have possibly made less effort into making sure the disagreements land as gently as possible than I would otherwise. I’ve also spent a long time on the comment already so have focussed on the disagreements rather than the parts of the post that are praiseworthy.
- ^
To be clear I find the time granularity issue very confusing personally, and I think it does have important implications for e.g. how we value extreme suffering (for example, if you define extreme suffering as “not tolerable even for a few seconds + would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain”, then much of human suffering is not extreme by definition, and the best way of reaching huge quantities of extreme suffering is by having many small creatures with a few seconds of pain (fish, shrimp, flies, nematodes). However, depending on how you discount for these small quantities of pain, it could change how you trade off between e.g. shrimp and human welfare, even without disagreements on likelihood of sentience or the non-time elements that contribute to suffering.
- ^
Here I use extreme suffering and non-offsetable suffering interchangeably, to mean anything worse than the lexical threshold, and thus not offsetable, and barely offsetable suffering to mean some suffering that is as close to the lexical threshold as possible but considered offsetable. Credit to Max’s blog post for helping me with wording some of this, though I prefer non-offsetable over extreme as this is more robust to different lexical thresholds).
- ^
to use your example
- ^
I don’t even have the maths ability to process how big this is, I’m just deferring to Wikipedia saying it’s larger than g64
Speaking just for myself (RE: malaria), the topline figures include adjustments for various estimates around how much USAID funding might be reinstated, as well as discounts for redistribution / compensation by other actors, rather than forecasting an 100% cut over the entire time periods (which was the initial brief, and a reasonable starting point at the time but became less likely to be a good assumption by the time of publication).
My 1 year / 5 year estimates without these discounts are approx. 130k to 270k and 720k to 1.5m respectively.
You can, of course, hold that insects don’t matter at all or that they matter infinitely less than other things so that we can, for all practical purposes, ignore their welfare. Certainly this would be very convenient. But the world does not owe us convenience and rarely provides us with it. If insects can suffer—and probably experience in a week more suffering than humans have for our entire history—this is certainly worth caring about. Plausibly insects can suffer rather intensely. When hundreds of billions of beings die a second, most experiencing quite intense pain before their deaths, that is quite morally serious, unless there’s some overwhelmingly powerful argument against taking their interests seriously.
If you replace insects here with mites doesn’t your argument basically still apply? A 10 sec search suggests that mites are plausibly significantly more numerous than insects. When you say “they’re not conscious”, is this coming from evidence that they aren’t, or lack of evidence that they are, and would you consider this an “overwhelmingly powerful argument”?
RE: inflation adjusted this just means that we’re using the value of USD in 2025 rather than at the time the conditional gift is due; $1000 in 2000 is worth like $1200 now for example.
Thanks for the catch! It was meant to be the same link as above; fixed
Legal template for conditional gift deed as an alternative to wagers on AI doom
Appreciate this! There are a decent amount happening; can you DM me with a bit more info about yourself / what you’d be willing to help with?
The claim isn’t that your answers don’t fit your definitions/methdologies, but that given highly unintuitive conclusions, one should more strongly consider questioning the methodology / definitions you use.
For example, the worst death imaginable for a human is, to a first approximation, capped at a couple of minutes of excruciating pain (or a couple of factors of this), since you value excruciating pain at 10,000 times as bad as the next category, and say that by definition excruciating pain can’t exist for more than a few minutes. But this methodology will be unlikely to accurately capture a lot of extremely bad states of suffering that humans can have. On the other hand, it is much easier to scale even short periods of excruciating suffering with high numbers of animals, especially when you’re happy to consider ~8 million mosquitos killed per human life saved by a bednet—I don’t have empirical evidence to the contrary, but this seems rather high.
Here’s another sense check to illustrate this (please check if I’ve got the maths right here!):
-GiveWell estimate “5.53 deaths averted per 1000 children protected per year” or 0.00553 lives saved per year of protection for a child, or 1 life saved per 180.8 children protected per year.
-They model 1.8 children under each bednet, on average.This means it requires approximately 100 bednets over the course of 1 year to save 1 life/~50 DALYs.
At your preferred rate of 1 mosquito death per hour per net[1] this comes to approximately 880,000 mosquito deaths per life saved,[2] which is
3 OOMs1 OOM lower than the ~8 million you would reach if you do the “excruciating pain” calculation, assuming your 763x claim is correct[3]
(I may not continue engaging on this thread due to capacity constraints, but appreciate the responses!)- ^
Here I make no claims about the reasonableness of 1 mosquito per hour killed by the net as I don’t have any empirical data on this / I’m more uncertain than Nick is but also note that he has more relevant experience than I do here.
- ^
180.8/1.8 * 24* 365 = 879,893
- ^
Assuming 763x GiveWell is correct, a tradeoff of 14.3 days of mosquito excruciating pain (MEP) for 1 happy human life, 2 minutes of MEP per mosquito, this requires a tradeoff of 7.9 million mosquitos killed for one human life saved.
763*(14.3*24*60)/2 = 7,855,848
- ^
Don’t have a lot of details to share right now but there are a bunch of folks coordinating on things to this effect—though if you have ideas or suggestions or people to put forward feel free to DM!
The values I provide are not my personal best guesses for point estimates, but conservative estimates that are sufficient to meaningfully weaken your topline conclusions. In practice, even the assumptions I just listed would be unintuitive to most if used as the bar!
I agree “what fits intuition” is often a bad way of evaluating claims, but this is in context of me saying “I don’t know where exactly to draw the line here, but 14.3 mosquito days of excruciating suffering for one happy human life seems clearly beyond it.”
It seems entirely plausible that a human might take a tradeoff of 100x less duration (3.5 hours * 100 is ~14.5 days), and also value human:mosquito tradeoff at >100x. It wouldn’t be difficult to suggest another OOM in both directions for the same conclusion.The main thing I’m gesturing at is that for a conclusion as unintuitive as “2 mosquito weeks of excruciating suffering cancels out 1 happy human life”, I think it’s reasonable to consider that there might be other explanations, including e.g. underlying methodological flaws (and in retrospect perhaps inconsistent isn’t the right word, maybe ‘inaccurate’ is better).
For example, by your preferred working definition of excruciating pain, it definitionally can’t exist for more than a few minutes at a time before neurological shutdown. I think this isn’t necessarily unreasonable, but there might be failure modes in your approach when basically all of your BOTECs come down to “which organisms have more aggregate seconds of species-adjusted excruciating pain”.
Where in Zach’s comment did he confirm this? He said:
”In the fall of 2024, Riley went to HR with the document Frances references to share complaints about a colleague’s behavior. Those concerns were the focus of Riley’s writing, and they drove how our team engaged with and shared (or didn’t share) it.” This doesn’t confirm that the complaints were about Frances?
Can you clarify exactly what you’re claiming is explicable to be included as context? Zach’s comment said, “Sharing HR concerns does not require disclosing a colleague’s sexual assault”. Frances said, “But further, it was more than that. He didn’t neutrally “disclose” it in a single, non-specific sentence. He wrote a description of me being raped. He describes it. He muses and speculates about my subsequent mental health crisis.”
Cowardice was largely a description of other people deferring to leadership, but minor quibble aside, these two claims are not mutually exclusive! The folks involved can be reasonably and fairly perceived to be cowardly, indifferent, and complicit to harms, while also getting things wrong, and also not staffed by ‘monsters’.